The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei
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me to the office just before 8 AM. I sign the voucher and go inside, flashing my ID quickly as I pass the security cameras and monitors and the sign that says YOU ARE BEING VIDEOTAPED. I hadn’t slept that night more than thirty minutes but it doesn’t feel that way to me; I feel fine, in fact I feel great, of course I am still high as a kite. I know it will get uncomfortable at some point later in the day when I have to tell the editorial company where she works that we will be taking our business elsewhere because their work is “sub-standard,” but for the moment I don’t have to deal with it. I go into my office and shut the glass door and crank up my iTunes and listen to this Girl Talk remix of a Deadmau5 track produced by Pretty Lights and re-remixed by Devon Aoki: I’m lying but it’s something like that. I am sure my enjoyment of this so-called music comes from the fact that I know these tracks are bootlegs, sent to me by a music company (called Earwig) that is trying to get into business with us, and so I am one of a handful of people on the planet who have them, and that is flattering, it would be to anyone. Although this story about them being rare bootlegs is probably not true, it’s probably just the line of mierda the music house gave me to make me feel extremely good about myself, which would translate down the line into more money for them. Everything is seduction, everything is sexual in the end, even the passcode to an FTP download site. I put on my Beats-by-Dre headphones and listen to the track. It’s really boring.
All forms of entertainment product have at their roots a base reason for being, a simple consumer benefit. If you ladder up to it, you see that certain things exist to make you frightened, for example, so that you can vicariously experience primal terror and survive it in the (relative) safety of a mall, endorphin rush as much a part of the experience as the popcorn. For millions of years Man lived with constant fear, in the wild, there were real monsters in the dark, things that would tear your head off and eat it while your eyes were still functioning, and we still need those neurons to fire now and then or they atrophy; this is a multibillion-dollar industry called movies and not to be confused with that other fear-based industry called politics. Or in the case of music, gangsta rap, the ultimate benefit is that it makes you feel empowered sexually when you listen to it, although if you are white and grew up in the suburbs like me fear is also a factor: again, I can experience this in the safety of my home or car, not on the actual Streets. And so it is a testosterone inducer, it has the same effect as the patch that ball-less guys are supposed to stick under their arms. The other chief benefits of entertainment properties are wish fulfillment and stress release (also known as comedy).
My calendar isn’t particularly full today. A few boring meetings in which I will listen to some of our industry’s least-talented creatives attempt to impress me with their awful, so-called ideas, and I will nod, pretend to hate them all, and say things such as “Do you really think this is the best you can do?” or “Do you really believe that bringing me work like this is going to help you keep your job?” They will always answer the same way, hemming and hawing and finally agreeing that there must be a better idea out there somewhere, and then I will just stare at them with feigned contempt for their vain struggle toward greatness which, deep down, none of us really cares about.
“If this isn’t your very best work, why are you showing it to me?”
“If you were me, what would you say to you?”
There would never be a reply to that one. I don’t think they could tell that the contempt was there in me, really. And I don’t mean to say it was completely real, most of it was not, it was an act. I do have actual contempt for them but it has nothing to do with their advertising skills because I barely even registered what it was they were showing me. I couldn’t care less. I have contempt for them because I have contempt for this entire industry, myself included. Some business writers say that you don’t motivate people by putting them down but I wasn’t trying to motivate them, I was trying to de-motivate them. I was going to have to fire half of them anyway, so why would I want them to do a good job? Why would I want to meet their kids? On the other hand, if I were to motivate them and they did a better job and then I fired them, that would be even more confusing to them, which would provide some additional absurdity-enjoyment to me, and to the universe at large. I suppose I don’t bother to motivate them because I am just too lazy to care whether or not anyone’s pain or dramatic arc is fully maximized. After all, this isn’t about me, I’m not the center of the universe, I’m just a cog in a larger wheel.
Around 1 PM I go to lunch by myself at Faco, which is a Mediterranean seafood restaurant specializing in Aegean shellfish prepared in wood-fired ovens. It is not far from the office. I sit at the bar, get the pan-seared octopus and the baked spinach and a $124 bottle of Sancerre. I have my laptop with me and look over the opening of my screenplay. It sucks. I stare at the octopus, but I don’t touch it for some reason, possibly because of how irritated I get by the waiters swarming around me, creating a vortex of ingratiating fantasy: hey, look, we’re all billionaires. The wine, the lack of sleep, and my thoughts wandering back to the night before contribute to making me feel unfocused, I can’t get any work done. I get up and leave a 44 percent tip. As I walk out my iPhone buzzes and I see there is an SMS from a 347 number I don’t recognize.
hey you
don’t remember much un4tunatly
sorry about the !@#$!
u mad @ me?
How did she get my number? I delete the text. It’s possible she looked at my phone when she was at my house—I vaguely recall setting it on my Ligne Roset dining table where she could have perused it—but she seemed far too drunk to have memorized a ten-digit number. Why am I feeling twinges of desire all of a sudden? I dial my assistant and she puts me through to the head of our production department—his name is Tom Bridge—and I tell Tom to pull the plug on Intern’s edit house after the Viva gig and if they ask why tell them it’s because of This Goddam Fucking Economy.
1.4
Henry Graham’s name had been on the master termination list since the day I arrived. Because he had a good relationship with one of our medium-sized clients it was delicate and so HR Lady and I agreed to fire him in six months and we posted it in the spreadsheet, which was on Google Docs, and into the Outlook calendar. That would give us time to find a reason other than the fact he was forty-eight years of age and had been at Tate for years and was nearing the time when he could take a small pension; one of my mandates was to not let any more employees reach their vesting date. When I was hired I had sat down with HR Lady and we did the math, made a chart of all the people in the department—there were eighty-six of them at the time, a number which now strikes me as strange—and we figured out which ones would stay and which ones would get the sack in the coming fiscal. In order to get my bonus I had to trim the department by at least 50 percent. That’s forty-three people; I remember thinking I was glad we were starting with an even number, as it would have been difficult to fire half a person, although technically speaking anyone who worked in this business for very long was half a person already. Then we did a schedule and we figured if we let four people go every month we’d get there. We picked certain dates, trying hard to make it look random so we can say that the word came from on high, or peg it to some client’s decision to cut back spending, etc. We pretended with each other in big, long sighs that it was difficult work, very hard, and we would go out afterward and have a nice meal and get shitfaced and take limos home and expense it because of how difficult it was.
Henry had had a pretty interesting life, you might say he had nine lives going until he met me and I guess I capped it at less. He was an actor in his teens, school plays and musicals and so on, and then he went out to Hollywood where he did OK for a while. You can IMDb him. He was in a bunch of films and TV shows and had a few scenes here and there with some name actors. James Spader, for example. But Henry had been born in a trailer park in Florida and so when he got a tiny bit of fame and some money he blew it all up his nose in his twenties. Yeah, he got laid a lot and had a good time but when he started showing up on set high his days were numbered. He just didn’t have the sort of juice that would let him behave like that for long, and he had refused one of the producers who had hired him in the hope of sexual dalliance and so his career went away. According to Henry, pretty much every straight male Hollywood star has